I HAVEN’T actually got round yet to watching the television drama about Brexit, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, because I’ve been too busy watching the drama about Brexit starring Theresa May, Dominic Grieve, John Bercow and a cast of thousands.

All right, I grant you that bits of it stretch credulity – there’s a preposterous minor character called Lord Adonis whom it’s frankly impossible to believe in – and that a lot of people have already given up on it, complaining that it’s depressing and doesn’t make any sense, but I urge you to give it a try. It’s a piece of tip-top entertainment that will grip you like a vice.

I admit that it’s getting more violent, and that the writers have tied themselves into knots as we approach the season finale due at the end of March. A lot of the characters have started doing things that undermine their positions or are just downright pointless.

Of course, you may subscribe to the critical school that holds that Brexit is a sort of Beckettian theatre of the absurd, designed to show that life is pointless and everything is meaningless, and that no one in the whole show has ever had the slightest idea of what they’re playing at, but you’d at least expect their motivations to be consistent with their actions.

Instead, the people who say they want to stop both Mrs May’s deal and a hard Brexit, under one of the ringleaders, Mr Grieve, have pushed through amendments that, unless there’s some unforeseen deus ex machina, actually make those outcomes more likely.

This subplot – Parliament versus Government – seemed reasonable enough. If you’re going to accept a scenario in which an obviously incompetent government, which has been found in contempt of Parliament and can’t muster a majority, is still, God alone knows how, flailing around like Hamlet’s father, muttering doom-laden warnings, you’d have to get the other side to kick back a bit.

But the supposed budgetary restrictions on the Government in the event of no deal don’t, in themselves, do anything to make no deal less likely. And Mr Grieve’s amendment, which will make Mrs May come back to Parliament with an entirely new plan within three days if she loses next week’s vote on her existing deal, doesn’t seem to take the Remainers any further forward.

To strike a mildly blasphemous note, a three-day resurrection that transforms and redeems everything has already been done in a much better story, and no one is going to believe in the Prime Minister as some kind of miracle worker.

But it would be equally implausible to imagine that Mrs May, when she loses on Tuesday – as everything so far suggests is inevitable – will say: “OK, let’s have another referendum, then. Or just withdraw Article 50 and tell the EU we’ve changed our minds.” The trouble is that you can’t write this extremely tiresome character out of the script.

There was a chance to do that a few weeks ago but they muffed it. And she’s completely incapable of improvising – just look at the robotic way she’s been delivering the same half-dozen meaningless lines for three years. So if Mrs May’s plan gets voted down, the only plausible next step in the drama is for her to return three days later with exactly the same plan in very slightly different words, since we already know that the EU isn’t going to alter its stance one whit.

The possible options for the denouement are then that, terrified of no deal – always painted as likely to shift the whole tone of the story into the territory of Children of Men or The Walking Dead – the MPs capitulate and vote for Mrs May’s terrible deal. Or that they don’t, and the clock runs down and people run around screaming and crashing into each other like the last 20 minutes of Titanic.

It’s theoretically possible to get either a shift to some European Free Trade Association-style deal or a suspension of Article 50 so that we can have a second vote or a general election, but those outcomes are only possible if you kill off Mrs May.

I’m beginning to wonder whether the Prime Minister’s behaviour is deliberately intended to echo that of her predecessor in the role, Ted Heath, another humourless figure who lost his grip on both party and country, but who by sheer pigheadedness managed to push through his ambition to take us into the EEC, even though very few people liked the idea. Like him, Mrs May simply isn’t paying any attention to what anyone else wants, but seems to be calculating that, if there’s a big parliamentary majority against no deal (as there is), and no majority for any other option, in the end everyone will just hold their noses and vote for her plan.

And then she will have won, which is all that matters to her.

That would be a depressing conclusion, since everybody else in the country thinks it’s the worst possible outcome. In fact, the only thing that convinced Leavers and Remainers appear to agree on is that Mrs May’s plan offers the worst of both worlds.

Yet it may simultaneously be true that it’s the best outcome that anyone was ever going to get out of the EU, which you may choose to see either as a good argument for staying in or a first-rate reason for getting out.

And though it seems highly implausible that it will get past the Commons on Tuesday, it’s not impossible that, dressed in some utterly third-rate fig-leaf, we’ll end up with it in the end.

But the fact that the storyline of Brexit is full of high-stakes drama that has to have some sort of resolution within the next couple of months doesn’t, unfortunately for those who are hoping that the schedulers will pull the plug on it, mean that the story is over; far from it.

No matter what the end of this particular story arc is, it will only be the cliffhanger that sets up the next instalment, when the warring factions may arrange themselves in different allegiances, but will stay as furiously divided as ever.

Like Resident Evil, which it so closely resembles, Brexit will carry on with the sequels until no one is left standing.

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